Turn Performance Marketing Into Performance Branding

This is a story of love and data and branding. Don’t worry: The protagonists are living happily ever after. You may be among the millions of people who have read The Five Love Languages, a 1992 self-help book by Gary Chapman. According to the author, there are five languages we use to express and, perhaps more importantly, receive love: Words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service and receiving gifts. This is a story of the sixth language, one especially for business-to-business marketers and branding specialists: Data. B-to-b versus b-to-c branding It’s no secret that b-to-b marketers aren’t as slick at branding as their b-to-c counterparts. According to LinkedIn think tank B2B Institute, business-to-business marketers spend 92% of their dollars on lower-funnel, direct response initiatives. As head of development Peter Weinberg writes, we target buyers who are already active in the market and generate a lead at the lowest possible cost, period. This is dubbed “performance marketing.” This is an effective way to target buyers who want your product now. Unfortunately, at any given time, that’s only 5% of your market. So how do you reach the other 95%? For us at SAS, the protagonists of this love story, this data set gave us pause. And when we integrated our own data, we realized our vehicle’s Check Engine light was on. And the Covid-19 pandemic made it glow even brighter. B-to-B Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Boring Our own data Research like the 95-5 rule and branding experts like Les Binet and Peter Field shows us that performance branding, as opposed to performance marketing, is the key to reaching that 95%. What does that mean? Performance marketing is about attaching metrics to successful conversions of customers to whom we already have a connection. Our own data showed that most of our lead generation came on a handshake: 60% of new contacts and 40% of new leads came from events, which draw mostly customers who are already in our portfolio. And in-person events were nonexistent at the height of the pandemic. But performance branding is about creating an impression, an abiding memory that exists beyond a transactional affair. It’s worth noting that SAS hadn’t conducted a branding exercise in 20 years. We were in at the invention of the analytics category and relied largely on a word-of-mouth growth strategy, which was effective when analytics wasn’t an incredibly crowded market. Cross-discipline But a shift from a performance marketing strategy to a performance branding strategy isn’t as easy as the marketing department choosing to turn on a dime. Sales still have to sell, finance still has to justify return-per-lead and we all have to face the executive office. Cross-disciplinary integration of the strategy isn’t just crucial. It’s existential. An understanding of the 95-5 rule shows finance that it doesn’t make sense to spend 100% of the marketing budget on the 5% of customers that are already attending our shows. It shows sales that there’s more to be had than handshake wins. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows marketing that it’s critical to leverage the expertise of finance and sales to create a cohesive take-the-brand-to-market strategy. All’s well that ends well So, how does our love story turn out? Our multi-year “Curiosity Forever” campaign, created in conjunction with McCann Worldgroup, leverages the values that we share with our customers and potential customers to create the impression, the abiding memory that is branding. Our metrics for a b-to-b campaign show good traction: Those exposed to the campaign are 40% more likely to accept a SAS InMail, 9% more likely to accept a connection and 22% more likely to respond to a SAS salesperson or recruiter. That sounds like brand love. The moral of this love story? Listen to what the data tells you. It is the language through which your customer communicates with you. And share the message with the other disciplines in your shop to make the most of your customer relationships. 4 Keys to Modernizing Customer Experience Measurement Strategies